Café Terrace at Night: Five details that unlock the genius of Van Gogh's original 'starry night'

With his first "starry night" painting in Arles in 1888, Vincent van Gogh transformed an ordinary city square into something extraordinary – here's how he did it, and what it means.

Before there was The Starry Night, nine months before, to be exact, there was Café Terrace at Night. Painted in September 1888, the luminous portrayal of a lantern-lit coffeehouse in the Provençal city of Arles (to which Van Gogh had moved six months earlier) is capped enchantingly by a deep blue wedge of pulsing, constellated sky.

The very first starry night that Van Gogh ever painted, it would prove to be pivotal for the artist, and not simply because it introduced a fresh fascination with the glimmering coordinates of the cosmos above.

With Café Terrace at Night (now on display in Tokyo as the climactic work in The Grand Van Gogh Exhibition) one can see Van Gogh reinventing both himself as well as the role of the artist as a witness to the universe – to what is past, or passing, or to come.

In his mid-30s when he moved to Arles from Paris in early 1888, Van Gogh had been something of a restless seeker, having tried his hand variously at art dealing, teaching, preaching, and being a self-taught artist.

Though his palette, increasingly influenced by Impressionism, had brightened considerably from the murky colours of his early Dutch canvases, his mental and physical health had sharply declined. Desperate, Van Gogh looked to the alluring light of Arles in the south of France. He saw Provence as a region of creative and spiritual renewal, where everything that came before could be erased and the self reborn.

Writing to his brother Theo from Arles in the weeks before creating Café Terrace at Night, Van Gogh began to distance himself from what he had painted previously, insisting that he no longer wished to "render exactly what I have before my eyes". Instead, he commited himself to conjuring "a sense of the infinite".

Determined to forge a new way of seeing, that Van Gogh set up his easel on a clear, warm September night in the quaint majesty of Arles' Place du Forum.

The location, a site shaped by millennia of cultural transformation from antiquity to the present, would prove crucial to the painting's enduring resonance and power. Suddenly, worldly objects began to vibrate with an otherworldly glow. The infinitude of the starscape above and fleetingness of the passing world below blurred into a single resplendent fabric.

What follows are the five key details in Café Terrace at Night that, once unpacked, reveal how Van Gogh transformed an ordinary city square into something stranger: an idealised elsewhere – a place where the past and present merge ambiguously into a dreamlike mirage that is neither here-and-now nor there-and-then, yet both at once.

The foreground of Van Gogh's canvas, occupying a full quarter of the painting, is a rippling sea of multi-coloured cobblestones that appears perversely to push back from the viewer the titular focus of the image: the café. A letter Van Gogh wrote to his sister shortly after completing the painting suggests that the prismatic splendour of this ragged mosaic of light and stone is the real........

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